When tracing is performed in a processing environment, one or more traces are produced. Each trace includes one or more consecutively executed instructions. The instructions included in the trace are those executed between a start and stop time of the tracing function.
There are different types of tracing techniques, including symbol/module based techniques and trace-based techniques. Trace-based techniques are defined independently of program module boundaries, in contrast to symbol/module based techniques. Sequences produced by trace-based techniques offer important advantages over traditional symbol/module based strategies, since the true program flow is inherently represented in the sequence of instructions. With trace-based techniques, the scope of an optimizer is extended to provide more global opportunities.
Although traces are helpful in providing optimizations for processing environments, there is an inherent difficulty in creating distinct identification handles for traces. Typically, to create handles used to identify traces, information regarding memory location is used. This is problematic, however, when memory location is dynamic.